I find the tendency to trivialise the 80s, the Cold War and
the genuine threat to liberty and democracy around the world that the USSR
represented quite disturbing.
History has been re-written. The Revisionists - particularly
millennial academics – now in charge of our educational establishments, have completely
whitewashed and entirely hollowed out the achievements of Ronald Reagan, Margaret
Thatcher and other world leaders of the time, and their role in exposing and
thus discrediting and playing their part in dismantling what was the CCCP
project. That they do not recognise the European Union’s Arbeit-Macht-Frei-esque
sloganeering to be akin to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union is disconcerting to
say the least to those that have lived through those times and find the signs
all too familiar.
Many of the under 40s have no idea of the threat communism
was, not just in terms of the formidable military arsenal the Soviets possessed
but in terms of the bloody revolutions, genocidal campaigns, and political
assassinations they carried out around the world.
The USSR backed and facilitated satellite regimes and
paramilitary movements weren’t limited to Africa, South America, the Middle
East and Asia alone: The Red Brigade in Italy operated openly in several
northern cities and just as a single example of their boldness they
orchestrated the kidnapping of a 2 time Christian Democrat PM (at that point
party leader in opposition), Aldo Mora, one or the major figures of post war
Italian politics. They killed 5 men in his security detail, held him prisoner
for 54 days, and then executed him by shooting him 10 times after covering him
with a blanket on the pretence of moving him to another location.
I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. I sensed and shared the
euphoria of East & West Germany merging into Germany. Some years ago, my
daughter bought me a fragment of the fallen wall on one of her trips to the continent.
This was a wall the Far Left built – way before Donald Trump was building
anything.
The Red Brigade in Italy was as extreme as extreme gets, but
we have our own hard left in this country that while less overt in its use of
violence (for now – but getting there) to support its goals, nonetheless has
sympathy with those movements that resort to those tactics. Enter Antifa and
the Koreshique Cult of Corbyn.
They shrug off Corbyn’s connections, affiliations and
sympathies to militant political movements, communist revolutionaries and the
terror groups they label “freedom fighters”. They do so because they have no
appreciation of those times - they argue communism or radical socialism was
corrupted by bad leaders in Russia and China but that the ideas themselves were
noble.
Trouble is, noble as they might sound, they are anything
but. Nothing the hard left want can be achieved while free will is still a
thing, while free will is still a human right, while free speech, the right to
criticise and offend is still a basic principle of a democracy where every
voice or opinion or belief or religion has every right to be heard, and equally,
be open to be commented on, lauded, ridiculed, lampooned or critically
analyzed.
Communism isn’t dead; it’s just got a better, cuddlier
marketing strategy in this day and age. It’s waging a culture war against
liberal democracy and our institutions and we HAVE to fight it.
With contributions from Daniel Cremin and Catherine Francoise.
